Job thread

[Merusk]

Thanks, and without a dobut. Never put the cart before the yoshi or let the tail wag the god or count chickens before they're eggs..

[ezrast]

First day at a new job and I've already sat through one interminable business planning meeting and been told I need to find an advisor/mentor/something within the next few weeks for reasons. Just let me sit in a cave and fix your servers like you hired me to do, shitters.

[Paelos]

First day at a new job and I've already sat through one interminable business planning meeting and been told I need to find an advisor/mentor/something within the next few weeks for reasons. Just let me sit in a cave and fix your servers like you hired me to do, shitters.

YOU'RE PART OF A TEAM NOW MAGGOT! 

[RhyssaFireheart]

First day at a new job and I've already sat through one interminable business planning meeting and been told I need to find an advisor/mentor/something within the next few weeks for reasons. Just let me sit in a cave and fix your servers like you hired me to do, shitters.

I've named my cube the Mushroom Manor and use it as my location message for Jabber here at work.  Luckily my boss more or less understands me and gets the joke there.

Yesterday I got to sit in a meeting with someone who's contract is up at the end of the month and she's explaining how to use this Excel spreadsheet/tool she created for our LBE monthly planning and it's great that she knows all this Excel coding and macros and stuff, but if you need a detailed guide to use it and there's almost no one else around who could edit or maintain it, then it's kind of a bitch to deal with.  Plus, the thought of having a spreadsheet with 60+ tabs by the end of the year is just... ugh.  Even if most of them are "super" hidden.  Saving the file in .xlsb format isn't going to save that much space over .xlsx format, I'm guessing.

[Selby]

and been told I need to find an advisor/mentor/something within the next few weeks for reasons.

Lame. 15 years a professional and I've never had a mentor or advisor in any way. Trial by fire!

[Yegolev]

I've had good experiences with mentors.  Maybe I'm the dumb one.

Possibly related, I think I really want to learn Go so that I can help fix these fucking "tools" we are using.

[Trippy]

Go is indeed what all the cool kids are using these days for systems programming.

[Yegolev]

Man, sounds I'm bona-fide after less than 10 months from square zero.  I should have gone into big finance.

[Quinton]

Go is good stuff.  Within 50% of C/C++ performance-wise in many cases (so not the kinds of performance issues you see with a lot of scripty languages), staticly typed, compiler catches your mistakes, builds nice self-contained static binaries for easy deployment, very solid standard library, and a streamlined syntax that *feels* scripty and is not full of punctuation and repetition like C++/Java.

Not perfect, not exactly a force on the desktop or in mobile, but for unix-y commandline tools or servers it is very very solid.  Unsurprising given that's what the design team was targeting.

[Yegolev]

I'm not dodging it, but I need to pace myself on learning new shit so I can actually do work.  The speedbump is when available tools won't serve my needs and, well I think I already complained about that.  Due to deadlines, I'm going to have to work around shortcomings rather than take a github sabbatical and enhance someone else's garbage.

Software devs get sad when you start referring to things as 'garbage'.

[Soln]

I'm continuing to spend time on nodeJS for the next few more months and then it's go into Go.  I've noticed what's been mentioned above plus several node contributors have moved to Go.  Since we're chatting, what about web assembly?   That seems what FB and others are planning with VR (yes, it's 1999 and VRML is back).

[Quinton]

I'm a bit skeptical about webassembly, but almost anything is better than "target a very tiny integer-safe subset of javascript that we hope you have a modern enough browser that it gets JIT'd into something relatively performant" that emscripten and other "compile to javascript" tools have been using prior.

I still think the biggest thing the web needs for "real apps" to be deployable is a sane neutral IR (which webassembly may accomplish) and the ability to get an efficient path to input / rasterization / audio / etc, instead of having to go through the DOM (not following closely enough to see if this is accomplished, but I can hope).

I don't think anyone except compiler/tools folks will be writing/generating webassembly -- instead, assuming it works out, we'll end up with a generation of browsers that can efficiently run platform-neutral code, possibly allowing for "native" web apps that are relatively competitive with real native apps.

[Soln]

Very interesting and well said, thank you.  The only other thing of big interest for me that I am pseudo following is MQTT.  I sense it may become more than what IOT may bring. Thoughts?

[Yegolev]

First I've read of it.  I'll need to understand it more but seems like it's aimed squarely at small payload, where I suppose AMQP is general-purpose?  Our ceiling will be in data delivery, not in messaging, but we aren't doing what other people are doing so YMMV.

[Strazos]

So the personnel actions are finally coming through for my onward assignment, which is good.

The disconcerting part is that they're all labeled as Separation actions. It's a technicality, and only for a year, but still...

[Yegolev]

No sooner than I completed 'hello, world' in Go, someone told me that Rust is the new hot thing.  So, sure, whatever.

Also, the jobs link is real again: http://ibm.biz/BdH3av

Of course, you'd be working for IBM instead of The Weather Channel, but it's still a great place.

[Trippy]

Nim is actually the new hot thing in that space. Go is what the cool kids (and cool neckbeards) are using to get shit done with (Google's internal stuff, Docker, Kubernetes, etc.). Rust really only has Mozilla (who is a sponsor of Rust) doing anything reasonably large-scale that I know of (their new browser rendering engine), though a large part of that is that Rust only hit 1.0 in August 2015.

[Viin]

So the personnel actions are finally coming through for my onward assignment, which is good.

The disconcerting part is that they're all labeled as Separation actions. It's a technicality, and only for a year, but still...

How long are you out there in the world before they make you do a stint in DC?
What's on your short list?

[Yegolev]

Nim is actually the new hot thing in that space.

Postponed reading at "indentation based syntax".  I still have PTSD: Python Tab Space Disorder.

I don't need to write a fast binary, but I can't create a PR if I don't know the language used in the project.

[Strazos]

So the personnel actions are finally coming through for my onward assignment, which is good.

The disconcerting part is that they're all labeled as Separation actions. It's a technicality, and only for a year, but still...

How long are you out there in the world before they make you do a stint in DC?
What's on your short list?

Technically, I think you can be out for about 15 years or so before you have to do a DC tour...but I'm not sure if that's actually enforced. My previous boss has been in for more than 14 years now, and she's never served domestically.

As for my short list, I'm thinking I'll be back in DC for my next tour in 2017, or perhaps somewhere else domestically. As of right now, I'm not necessarily seeing anything out there that blows me away, for which I wouldn't need to pick up a language. Spanish gives me a lot of options, but none of them are overwhelming.

[Selby]

Recruiters contacting me to let me know there are great opportunities in 2 or 3 companies in my area, all paying $20-25k/year less, make me laugh.

[Yegolev]

Extra points if they obviously didn't read your profile/resume.

[Selby]

Sadly they did. They really want my skills but apparently don't want to pay for them.

[Chimpy]

Sadly they did. They really want my skills but apparently don't want to pay for them.

Welcome to America!

[Merusk]

It's not true America until the three CEOs looking run into Selbys CEO and discuss how much they're looking to pay. At which point Selby is fired for spurious reasons and all 4 are looking for someone at the lower rate.

[Samwise]

Ever looked at the people walking out the door during a layoff and envied their severance pay?

[schild]

Yes.

[Yegolev]

Yes.  Additionally, many of them obtained early retirement packages, which were more awesome than that sounds.

My favorite people are the ones who took a retirement package upon outsourcing, then took an awesome retirement package from the second company, and finally got jobs back in the original company after whatever the required time lapse was.  There aren't enough bags of dicks.

[Kail]

Extra points if they obviously didn't read your profile/resume.

I got one of those the other day.  It was super weird.

-"We've got your resume on file and it looks like you've got a lot of great experience so we'd like to offer a supervisor role."
"Great!"
-"What kind of career specifically are you looking for?"
"...Um, well, as it says on my resume, I just finished my engineering degree, so something in engineering would be ideal."
-"Engineering?  We don't generally staff engineering positions.  Are you sure?"
"Pretty sure, yeah?"
-"Yes, well, I've reviewed your application and unfortunately you don't meet our requirements for this position.  Thankyougoodday."
"Okay, uh, bye, I guess."

[Sky]

My favorite people are the ones who took a retirement package upon outsourcing, then took an awesome retirement package from the second company, and finally got jobs back in the original company after whatever the required time lapse was.  There aren't enough bags of dicks.

Actually that sounds exactly like my ideal endgame. I'm your favorite person this week!

[Yegolev]

It's easy to forget my rule of hating the game instead of the player in extreme situations.  I'm sure I'd have taken all of those packages.  I'm largely bitter about never cracking the in-crowd at TCCC.

[brellium]

Interesting discussion at work...

Coworker: Things are pretty much the same here in this department (just how work is, and how not much changes), except we now have people doing side by sides with us taking notes, so I don't even know if we'll be here next month. (in a kinda sarcastic tone).

Me: You mean the Indians, I've seen around?

Coworker: Yeah, they're business efficiency experts from some company, um, Tata? Have you heard of them?

Me: Yeah...

Coworker: Do you know what they do?

Me:

[Yegolev]

Get that LinkedIn profile up to speed.

I think Tata makes cars.

[Paelos]

Yeah if the Tata Group shows up, get your resume updated because your company is about to get outsourced.

[Sky]

I think Tata makes cars.

Are they bodacious?